The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  “Oh. Well. Yes.” He squinted, turning it sideways. “I suppose, now that you tell me.”

  “You know, John, not everybody in the world is as brilliant at everything they do as you are,” she said, trying to hide the hurt in sarcasm. “Some of us need a little practice to do even something as insignificant as a little needlework.”

  Now it was his turn to apologize, which he did prettily enough, telling her with genuine surprise in his voice that she was a woman of many talents.

  “Name one,” she’d said, fighting back tears that suddenly ambushed her. It was such a little thing. “I cannot spin or weave or play a musical instrument. I cannot sing. I cannot do any of the things the wife of a brilliant man should be expected to do. Just . . . name . . . one.”

  “You can read and write and cipher,” he said, looking at her in puzzlement. “How many women can do that? You may not sew a fine stitch but you are the perfect wife for a scholar.” And he’d kissed her, lightly, affectionately, on the head, in the same manner in which she had kissed his wound.

  But those are not womanly gifts, she’d wanted to say. Not womanly gifts at all. The womanly things she just couldn’t seem to get right—not even the most basic thing, such as motherhood—and she was not to be allowed, it seemed, to do the unwomanly things of real importance.

  He stroked her hair gently, then she felt the weight of it lift from her neck as he kissed her neck, just a nibble at first, and the comforting kiss became something more, as his tongue began to explore her ear. He tossed the offending tapestry to the floor and then kicked it aside. “You are the perfect wife for this scholar,” he said, pulling her to him.

  His hands—both his left and his right—seemed to have sustained no impairment in their function. She had just enough time to think, before her mind surrendered to her body’s more urgent needs, that it was gratifying to note, in this one area at least, her husband found her womanly function more than adequate.

  The next day she confessed her failure again to the sketch of the ugly duchess. “It seems John is to be denied an accomplished wife,” she said in disgust as she picked the tapestry up from the floor and started to throw it away. Then she had a second thought. This creature, or this needlepoint picture of a creature, ugly, imperfect as it was, she had made with her own hands. It did not exist before she made it. The pucker in the flank wasn’t so bad, but the hole in the horn could not be fixed. Yet he had a beautiful eye, just a tiny spot of white silk floss in the blue of the eye, to catch the light. She’d been proud of that eye. There was a grief in just throwing it away. She smoothed out the tapestry and covered up the top part with the edge of her hand. There, that was not so bad. A few more stitches on the wide body to fill in the skimpy parts—someday she might cut off the part with the horn. It didn’t have to be a unicorn. Maybe it just really wanted to be a horse.

  “Kate Gough, you are as mad as the painter who sketched that other ugly portrait,” she muttered aloud.

  But she could not bring herself to throw the embroidery away. She folded it up carefully and put it away until she could think more on its redemption.

  The bells of St. Mary-le-Bow tolled mournfully as Sir Thomas walked behind the coffin of his father. It was a blessing that the burial ground of the church in St. Lawrence Jewry was close by the patriarchal home in Milk Street. It was a cold, gray day and Thomas was chilled both in body and in spirit and feared of giving out. He was not prepared for this day and felt oddly cut loose from his moorings, adrift on a choppy sea. In Sir John More’s eightieth winter his demise could hardly have been unexpected. But it was. Thomas had never imagined the world without his father in it.

  The sad procession passed a few boyhood landmarks that prodded the heaviness around his heart into a hellish foreboding. How could this be? How could this lion of the King’s Bench, who had stood sentinel for all of Thomas’s life against the forces of disorder, this staunch defender of duty and discipline and law, be felled by a bout of indigestion? Where was the order in that? It was for Thomas as though his metaphor for God the Father was dissolving into vapor. The Father lived as long as the father lived.

  He had walked down this very lane, past the church of St. Mary Magdalen, which now took up the mournful tolling with its one bell, so many years ago. It was an image buried deep in his memory, reborn as fresh as yesterday, his boy’s hand in his father’s larger one, on his way to be page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England. As they walked his father had lectured him upon his duty. A grand opportunity for a boy, he’d said, to enter the service of the most influential man in England, admonishing Thomas to acquit himself well, not to embarrass his father, to do his duty, and one day he would be a great man too.

  They’d passed the tall stone fountain in West Chepe. It had been a dismal, dreary day like this and like today there were few waiting at the fountains to fill their buckets with water from the Tybourne River. There had been a burning on Tybourne Hill, a Lollard heretic, his father had said, as Thomas wrinkled his nose at the lingering smell of smoke and seared flesh, explaining that Lollardy was a form of anarchy, an evil bent on destroying the order of the world. It was the first time Thomas had ever heard the word.

  As the procession turned up St. Lawrence Lane on its way to the church, they passed Blossoms Inn. A few curious travelers watched as the mournful procession passed. Thomas recognized only the innkeeper, who removed his hat and bowed his head. He and his father had stopped on that day so long ago and shared a cup as the father continued his instruction to the son. That was the day that Thomas first became aware that John More had his son’s future mapped out as carefully as he laid out a legal argument. A future which, he was later to be reminded, was to be bound up with law at Lincoln’s Inn and not theology at Oxford.

  When Thomas thought he could not take another step—he had not slept or eaten in the three days it took his father to die, the very picture of the dutiful son keeping watch at his father’s deathbed—his daughter Margaret suddenly appeared at his side and offered him her arm. Together they completed the short journey that ended in the churchyard. There was not much ceremony, not the ceremony one would expect of a great man—his father had left instructions when he realized that he was dying. A requiem mass was celebrated by the parish priest, and thirteen mourners—thirteen as in the number of Christ’s Last Supper—gathered around the tomb. Thomas watched, almost numb with disbelief, as his father’s coffin was duly sprinkled with holy water and lowered into the stone tomb.

  It would not occur to Thomas until much later, after they had returned to the house in Milk Lane for a funeral feast attended by some very important people and presided over by his father’s now widowed fourth wife, after Thomas had lain sleepless for most of the night in his boyhood room, trying to wrap his mind around the realization that his father was not asleep in the great carved bed in the room below but in the cold ground of St. Lawrence chuchyard, after he realized that he would no longer pass his father in the halls of Westminster and kneel to pay his respects, that his father’s ambition had been fulfilled upon seeing his son Chancellor of England.

  And now Thomas had to write the rest of the story himself. He had fulfilled his duty to his father. He was free to serve the Church.

  “What do you think, John?” Kate said to her husband’s back as he was bent over his desk. She waved Catherine Massys’s letter of invitation in front of him. “Do you care if I go?”

  He scanned the letter, frowned, and handed it back to her. “Are you sure this is something you really want to do?”

  Translation: I would rather you didn’t.

  “It would just be for a few days. She says I can travel both ways in the company of Quentin’s son and his wife. It will be perfectly safe. Leuven is only a day or so south of here.”

  “A hard day. And of course I would care. I would miss you. What about your women’s . . . meeting?”

  “Quentin’s son is leaving on Saturday after the
Friday meeting, so I would only miss one. Just think how much work you could get done without me to distract you.”

  “You never distract me.” He smiled and kissed her lightly. “It is the work that distracts me from you.”

  “You are a silver-tongued flatterer, John Frith.” And she swatted him lightly on the shoulder. “But I’ve become so accustomed to your sweet talk I don’t think I want to be without it. I’ll just tell Catherine I appreciate the invitation to visit, but I can’t be away from my husband that long,” she said.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  But that night as she watched John laboring by candlelight over his translations, she reconsidered. “It would really only be for a few days. You would hardly have time to miss me,” she said.

  “I will miss you the minute you are gone.”

  He put down his pen and stretched. She walked behind him and massaged his neck, feeling the firm tight muscles relax beneath her fingers as he closed his eyes and moaned in relief. “You know, sweet wife,” he said between umm’s and ah’s “I think I already miss you, and you’re only thinking about going.” But when her fingers stilled, he picked up his pen and went back to work.

  The day after his father’s burial, Sir Thomas More took to his Chelsea bed complaining of heaviness in his chest. All Dame Alice’s poultices and potions were of no avail to him. He lacked the strength to get out of bed. In his feverish dreams he was a boy again, lost and wandering in a dark wood, calling for his father who did not answer.

  But on the fourth morning, his son-in-law Roper brought the news that, while the lord chancellor was involved with his father’s death and bound up in his grief, Cardinal Wolsey had been tried for treason and sentenced to lose his head. When Thomas heard that Wolsey had cheated the executioner by dying on his way to the block, he smiled. At least the old reprobate had been spared the indignity of the headsman and managed to confound the king’s best-laid plans, yet again.

  Thomas called for Barnabas to help him dress, and staggered, coughing and sputtering phleghm, down to his study. He drank Alice’s broth to get rid of her and then took up his pen. The fact that Wolsey had been convicted meant only one thing: Henry had decided to break with Rome. Maybe not today, or even tomorrow, but someday soon. Thomas More knew he would be called upon to choose between Crown and Church. This time the choice would be his. In the meantime he would fill the world with such a fury of refutation against the heretics that William Tyndale’s ears would burn as though the flames already scorched them.

  Thomas would find his path through the dark wood. An imagined flame of a human bonfire would light the way.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The true heart of a wife [is the] preciousest gift that a man hath in this world.

  —WILLIAM TYNDALE

  ON THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT

  Thomas Cromwell left the king’s privy chamber more chagrined than he was when he entered. The meeting with the king and the agent he’d brought at the king’s request had taken an unexpected turn.

  Cromwell had not been happy when Henry asked him for the name of someone whose absolute loyalty and silence could be counted on, someone with open ears and a way of ferreting out information, someone on whom he could rely to go to the Continent and collect good opinion on his “great matter” to present to the pope. That could mean only one thing: if the king was still seeking influential testimony, then the break with Rome was not as imminent as Cromwell had hoped.

  Sir Thomas Elyot’s name had come quickly to mind. Not that he was that reliable. But he was a noble acquaintance who needed employment, and Thomas Cromwell knew the value of granting favors to financially embarrassed parliamentarians. The king seemed pleased enough with the choice, instructing Elyot to report to Master Cromwell for any expenses he might incur during his mission. Cromwell liked the sound of that. It was good that he was to be the paymaster; it would put the fellow even more in his debt—and keep him informed.

  Thinking that was the end of the matter, Cromwell had bowed and was about to take his leave when Henry stayed him with his hand.

  “You may be wondering, Master Cromwell, why in light of our recent conversations with you and Archbishop Cranmer, we are still seeking testimony in this matter. We are not. As you have advised, we have chosen another course.”

  “But Your Majesty said—ah, I see. It is a ruse. Very clever of Your Majesty.”

  He’d been worried for a moment. He cared not a saint’s knucklebone for the Boleyn woman, but getting shed of the Catholic queen could only be a good thing for the cause of reformation. And getting rid of Rome would be a good thing for the treasury—all that wealth, all that land and gold and silver owned by the Church and shut up in England’s monasteries and cathedrals. “Just think if the Crown had control of that, Your Majesty, and that neither the king nor his kingdom nor its archbishops nor bishops nor even its humblest parish priests would any longer be subject to Rome’s tyranny.”

  It was an action bold enough to take the breath away.

  Even Phillip the Fair of France had not dared go so far when he’d quarreled with Pope Urban, installing instead a French cardinal as the head of the Church in France. Cromwell had advised Henry against that historic precedent by pointing out the disastrous results. Christendom had wound up with two popes for a while—one in Rome and one in Avignon and then a third to overrule the other two.

  “One supreme head,” he’d advised the king, “of both the temporal and the sacred. Then the king could grant his own divorce.” That was the seed Cromwell had planted in Henry’s head, the seed Cranmer had watered, and now it was close to sprouting in spite of Chancellor More’s fanatic clutching at the old order.

  “You are right, Master Cromwell. Gathering testimonials is only a pretense,” the king said, idly examining his hands, adjusting his signet ring as though the matter were not important at all. “Master Elyot’s real mission is to seek out William Tyndale and John Frith. You will brief him on this mission in secret.”

  Cromwell paused as he tried to figure what this might mean. He’d thought the ruse was simply intended to throw the Roman prelates off their guard, so as to catch them by surprise when Parliament declared Henry VIII, King of England, the supreme head of God’s Holy Church in England.

  “I do not understand, Your Majesty. Forgive me, but I thought that had already been done; Stephen Vaughan has already found them and brought back their answer.”

  Cromwell was later to remember the look on Henry’s face and see it again many times in the next few years. It was a flash of anger, shocking and swift in its approach, like ragged ground lightning on a clear summer day. Just as dangerous and just as fleeting.

  “Found them and lost them.” He waved his hand as if waving away a gnat. “Vaughan’s was a separate mission. Masters Tyndale and Frith have spurned the king’s grace. If you locate them again, you are to assist Sir Elyot—they are probably still hiding somewhere in the Low Countries, though they may have sought other cover by now—in bringing them back.” And then he added, “By whatever means necessary.”

  “If I may ask, Your Majesty—”

  “To stand trial for heresy, of course.”

  “Of course,” Cromwell answered. But he really didn’t understand. He’d thought the king had been influenced in their favor by Anne Boleyn. Her influence was why he had offered them grace and favor in the first place. If he had now changed his mind because of the insult to his vanity, why not rely on the spy Thomas More and Bishop Stokesley had sent? Henry Phillips was a notorious ne’er-do-well. If anybody could trick them out of the protection of the English Merchants’ House, it would be he . . . unless the king no longer trusted Chancellor More.

  “Your Majesty, Chancellor More has already an agent working on this, as I am sure you are aware.”

  “Chancellor More is distracted.”

  Why not fan the flames of More’s ill favor? Cromwell thought, as he said, “Distracted from the king’s business?”

  “It j
ust may be that though he is a layman, Chancellor More’s purpose lies more in Pope Clement’s interests than his king’s. Is the mission clear then?”

  “Quite clear. Find Tyndale and Frith and bring them back by whatever means required.” Then sensing that this meeting had come to an end, he bowed. “Will that be all, Your Majesty?”

  “That is all, Master Cromwell.”

  As he left the privy chamber with Elyot in tow, it occurred to Thomas Cromwell that the king’s favor was as mercurial as his moods. He would do well to remember that.

  A spider had spun its web wide between two bushes in the courtyard of the English House. John Frith pondered the web’s gossamer symmetry, the strength of the almost invisible filament that anchored it to the bush nearest the bench on which he sat with William Tyndale. The sunlight slanted across the web, gilding the silken ribs of the gossamer edifice. It was a thing of beauty, not unlike the intricate splendor of a rose window in a great cathedral, John thought. A thing of beauty, but at the heart of that intricate beauty a black-robed spider devoured a struggling firefly at its leisure. John would have freed the hapless insect, but it was too late. The head of the firefly was already being slowly digested by the spider.

  It was a sobering metaphor for what he had just offered to do.

  “I would like to wait until my wife returns,” he said to William Tyndale. “She has gone to visit Catherine Massys in Leuven.”

  Tyndale looked down at his ink-stained hands; the interlocking fingers worked and his knuckles cracked. “I understand,” he said. “You know, John, you do not have to go at all. We can wait; we can find another way. I had hoped to get some return indication from Stephen Vaughan as to His Majesty’s mind after receiving my letter. It may be that he is open to being persuaded to let the Bible be legally distributed. But you are a fugitive just as I am. The risk would be considerable for either of us.”